Neil Gaiman made an excellent post the other day that covered, among other things, the effect of sharing on book sales. Entitled More on Free and Suchlike, he responds to a bookseller that accuses him of harming independent booksellers by giving away a book for free online:
The books you sell have “pass-along” rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don’t.
When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.
Go read the full thing, it’s really excellent.
He’s got a good follow-up post today too (Born Free), about a program that’s part of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland. As part of World Book Day, £1 book tokens are being distributed to schoolchildren across the UK and Ireland, and a bunch of “World Book Day £1″ books are being published specifically for the occasion. It’s a wonderful promotion, and I encourage everyone go to read his post (from which all of the information in this paragraph is shamelessly lifted) to find out more.
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